


Big Brother, Little Sister

by snackbaskets



Series: The Robin Protocol [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: BAMF Cassandra Cain, Bat Family, Batfamily Shenanigans, Big Brother Dick Grayson, Canon-Typical Violence, Family Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Hugs, Protective Dick Grayson, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, batfam, but lovingly, cass repays him in gratuitous violence, dick tacklehugs his sister from danger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-20 14:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19994098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snackbaskets/pseuds/snackbaskets
Summary: "I'm big," Cass insisted."I'm bigger," Dick replied. "You know the protocol. Biggest bird grabs the little one, no matter how big the little one might be.""I'm beginning to think you just like tackle-hugging people," Barbara said, and Dick shrugged.alternately: next up in the series of the family hugging each other out of danger, this time with dick and cass!!





	Big Brother, Little Sister

**Author's Note:**

> why dick and cass?? great question!!!! the answer is i dont know what happened but i love them

“You ever think about Two-face’s number thing?” Dick flipped over a goon and their wildly swinging semi automatic, safety on and magazine full of the wrong caliber as they frantically tried to get away from two of Gotham’s vigilantes doling out Justice in the form of multiple compound fractures. “Like, why only twos? What if there was a villain who had a thing with the number three, specifically? Or seven? How come our boy Harvey never branches out?” 

Cassandra shattered a kneecap and didn’t respond.

“N, I love you, but this is why we never worked out.”

“Oracle, I love you too, but _why not eleven_?”

“Too much,” Cass said, and threw a man across the room. The semicircle of henchmen around her took a few steps back.

“Alright, I’ll give you that. Eleven might be excessive.”

He hooked his legs around one of the armored enforcers’ necks and hung on tight, jabbing him with an escrima and letting the combination of voltage and oxygen dep take him down. Across from him, Cass struck one goon in the kidney with her fist and nailed another in the groin with her heel, darting about like a viper to her next victim before the previous had a chance to hit the ground. The one she’d kicked in the junk might have been crying. He couldn’t blame them.

“O, darling, angel, light of my life?”

“Nightwing, candy of my eye?”

“Seeing as we’re almost wrapped up here, could you please update us on what, exactly, these guys’ deal is?”

“You’re the son of the Detective. You figure it out.”

Dick locked another henchman in a sleeper hold and sighed.

“Slave driver,” he moaned.

“Whiny,” Cass replied, and Barbara laughed.

He and Cass shared a brief nod and snagged a gunner each by the backs of their vests and smashed them together, sandwiching a third, unfortunate combatant between them and leaving all three in various states of concussed on the floor. The remaining baddies stared. Dick smiled. They ran.  
Cass picked over the unconscious and groaning unfortunates, gathering up guns and patting pockets for burner cells, scraps of paper, or other conveniently amateur sources of intel as Dick did the same, humming along to some top 20 melody he’d heard on the radio that last weekend. He stopped a beaten woman from crawling away with a foot between her shoulderblades, and she whined.

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s your own fault, you know,” Dick pointed out, and pulled the mask and goggles from her face. “Oh! Hi, Cindy. Been a while.”

“Hi, Nightwing. Was that Ke$ha?”

“I thought you went clean after your last parole. What happened? And yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s Ke$ha.”

“Economy’s rough on ex-cons, stretched myself too thin, one job led to another. You know how it is.”

“You listen to Ke$sha?” another half-conscious henchman croaked, voice stuffed and nasally, probably in part due to the exceptionally broken nose they were sporting.

“She’s a very talented musician,” Cindy said.

“I heard she finally got away from her old producer. The shitty one.” 

“Oh, good for her,” Dick replied. 

Across the room, someone screamed, and a quick glance showed it was just a goon who’d woken up to a faceful of Cassandra Cain’s brand of silent and unnerving interrogation, which was about 90% standing over someone and 10% tilting her head while she did it. The combatant Dick hadn’t pinned to the floor said something along the lines of ‘No thanks, I’m gonna go back to being unconscious,’ and rolled over with a wheeze. Beneath him, Cindy sighed.

“You know, telling you my employers’ plans is gonna get me offed one day.”

“Consider it a plea deal. I know a great lawyer, and he’s only Two-Face half the time. You know, Two-Face? Half? Get it?”

“Christ, that was awful. Just send me back to jail.”

“Intel, please.”

“Slow your damn roll, tight-ass, I’m getting there. I’d say I had to choke down my pride, first, but I think I coughed that up somewhere along with my spleen.”

“I know a guy with asplenia. He gets on just fine.”

“N, cut the chatter!” Babs snapped. “Scans are picking up chemical signatures-- the place is rigged!”

Dick shot a glance at Cass, who briefly inclined her head, hooking an arm under her poor victim’s chest and hauling them up onto her shoulder as Dick did the same. Cindy yelped.

“Sorry, Cindy. Change of plans, trying not to explode, you know how it is. Did you know you were surrounded by explosives?”

“They _rigged_ the warehouse?” she screeched, sounding a lot more angry about it than concerned, which, for a woman as pure Gothamite as she, was pretty much par for the course. “That motherfucker set us up! Set me up! I bet you I was the one who _synthesized _those explosives!”__

__“And you gave them to a crime boss?”_ _

__“N, you got any idea how much a degree in chemical engineering costs? They weren’t made for hurtin’ people, anyway!”_ _

__“Then what are we dealing with?”_ _

__“They’re designed for drug sabotage-- meant to disperse neutralizing agents to reduce the quality of the product without property damage or human casualties. Like your dinky-ass smoke bombs, but for cuttin’ cocaine.”_ _

__“So why are we running?”_ _

__“Cause they got a bad habit of reacting with unprocessed silicon and blowing the hell up.”_ _

__“You mean like the unprocessed silicon in pre-’65 Gothamite drywall, commonly used in industrial warehouses?”_ _

__“That would be the one.”_ _

__“You remind me a lot of my little brother, did you know that?”  
Cindy shouted something back he didn’t have a chance to hear as he tossed her over his shoulder and into a pile of garbage outside the warehouse, running back in before she’d even hit the ground as passing Cass on her way back out, a gunner over each of her shoulders._ _

__“Show off.”_ _

__“Lazy.”_ _

__“I found the timer they’re running on-- it’s a proximity alarm-- tripped when you two started throwing people around. They should have gone off instantly, but your friend Cindy’s got a biometric failsafe in the circuit that adds time when they’re about to be detonated near silicon and warm bodies. You’ve got less than two minutes. I’m trying to get in, but it looks like a closed loop.”_ _

__“Can we put you in manually?”_ _

__“Disrupting the loop’s a great way to get vaporized, so unless you’re in the mood…”_ _

__“Noted.”_ _

__Dick hauled another pair of thugs upright and marched them out, heaving a third up with a hand and nudging them forward, urging their concussed limp outside. A few others had since struggled back to their feet and were crawling-slash-hobbling their own ways out, likely lost to the stinking Gotham night to be caught another day. Bruce would be cranky about it, but he could never stay mad at Cass for long, so Dick figured if he snuck back to Bludhaven fast enough he could avoid a lecture._ _

__“Last ones,” Cass said as they ran back inside, out of breath and sweating. Dick found himself wishing for Duke or Jason. Kate or Bruce, too-- much as they might bitch about Dick letting himself get caught off guard, they were built for more powerhouse work like this, unlike him and Cass._ _

__Inside was empty save for the stench of blood, violence, and urine, the last few unconscious bodies having up and shambled off, or at least looking that way._ _

__“Babs, anything on thermals?”_ _

__“Just you two, now get _out_!”_ _

__“You heard the lady.”_ _

__Dick boosted Cass out the nearest window instead of running back out the front, trying to shave some seconds off their escape, Cass’ hands wrapping around his wrists and yanking him through after her, wiry little body taught with exertion and unspent determination. He barely stuck the landing on the concrete beside her, tired muscles threatening to buckle underneath him as he forced himself back up and away, moving toward the few criminals who’s stayed put in their garbage pit of safety. Less than a hundred yards and closing…_ _

__“ _Get down!_ ” Babs shouted, and it was all instinct from there._ _

__Cass darted sideways at the same moment Dick opened his arms and lunged for her, her fluency in the body the only thing that kept her from getting all the way out of reach and leaving Dick to grab empty air. Still, she wasn’t prepared for the weight of him when he hit her, bowling her over and tucking her against his chest like Bruce did to him, and that much seemed to be familiar; Cass folded herself down into a tight ball against him, burying her face in his neck at the same moment the warehouse coughed out a loud _pop_ , and a split second later, a fireball that threw them both across the concrete. They were at least far enough from the blast radius not to be caught in the fire, itself, but Dick was definitely gonna be nursing some concussion injuries for a while. The criminals they’d saved seemed to be fine, if the degree of injury Dick and Cass had suffered were minor enough at their distance. Everything beyond that thought was a haze of color and sound, fuzzy at the edges and oozing out of his grasp as he tried to catch it. _ _

__He was only dimly aware of being rolled over onto his back, Cass, or at least something vaguely Cass-shaped disentangling herself from his grip and sitting up, careful fingers prodding his neck, his sides, and his ears with practiced efficiency. He groaned, and a hand patted his cheek._ _

__“Rule number one,” he wheezed. “Protect the littlest bird.”_ _

__Cass leaned down and pressed the mouth of her mask to his forehead, warm and breathing and alive._ _

__“Big brother,” she said, and he may not have been as good at reading people as she was, but it sounded like _thank you_. _ _

__Distantly, he heard the smack of a fist on skin, and the shouts of angry bodies gearing up for a fight amongst the shuffle of garbage bags and spat out cursed that sounded a lot like ‘ _those goddamn fuckin’ bats_ ’. Say what you will about Gotham’s scum, but they sure get props for their resilience. Dick struggled to sit up, and Cass stopped him with a firm hand planted over his sternum, one of his escrimas vanishing from his fingers so quickly he wouldn’t even have noticed it if he weren’t looking straight at it, and appearing instead in Cass’ open palm, clutched with the easy danger of a woman who could make a weapon of mass destruction from her pinky toe. _ _

__“Now I protect you,” she said, and Dick smiled.  
“Little sister,” he replied in lieu of thanking her outright, but from the way her smile wrinkled the corners of her white-outs, he figured she got the idea._ _

**Author's Note:**

> hope you guys liked it!!! i have at least a few more planned out, but more might happen!!
> 
> the ones i have planned are tim-dami, jay-bruce, and steph-duke but keep ur eyes peeled!! ive been recently struck by some Love Selina so we might see some catmomma too


End file.
